Lessons
by tiptremble
Summary: WIP, first ever fanfiction (so be nice) Season 7 AU: With Sam's memories of hell restored and the brother Dean knew seemingly gone forever, the brothers have had a hard road recalibrating their relationship and the hunt. Even this uneasy peace may be shattered as their battle with the leviathans takes a shocking turn. Rated T for (future) violence and dark themes


**Hello all, this is my first ever submission to FF. I've been lurking for ages and for the first time suddenly got an idea nagging at the back of my head to write something. This is very much a WIP. I want this first chapter to act as a prologue to a story that will explore some of the themes I've written about here. The story is likely to be a season 7 AU where Sam has reacted very differently to the memories of Hell, and the Leviathans take a very different form.**

**Named characters may change as I add to the story. I'm going to have to see as I go, but I just couldn't wait to get this first bit up on the net!**

**I think you're all awesome, and as a writer I find fan fiction writers incredibly inspiring, so I'm really excited to join y'all!**

**Disclaimer: I don't own this. It owns my head.**

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He sees Lucifer. He "hears" Lucifer.

To the others, Lucifer could be contained within the boundaries of a man and a man's face. To some shabby facsimile of life. There was fear, yes, but a knowable fear. It's the reason hunters survive against all the odds, by reducing the horrors that live in the wild to the mundane and the pitiable. Items that hold their logic even out in the day and the dust. Creatures that speak with men's and women's voices and give voice to urges that men and women all feel. A Hunter keeps terror at bay because all terror can be known.

Lucifer shattered that illusion. Evil could not be known. Evil had no face. But it filled every crevice. On the surface, the shadow world, evil was an abstract for philosophers to ponder and to break down by motivation, feeling, reason. In the shadow world you could argue that evil was not real. People, they muddied the waters. And God had let them. His unseeing Love had sealed their fate to live in a swamp of lies for as long as their broken bodies would allow them to wade through the muck.

So how to explain to people still of that world all that might be contained in that one word? Lucifer. It was breath in a place never troubled by the wind. And in Lucifer evil trembled under the weight of its own truth. Evil reached out its tendrils and grabbed hold of those few tiny souls already inching their way towards the light and it shook them. It threw them against the carefully constructed foundations of their life until they shattered. It spun them until the gravity that held them in place was nowhere to be found. And with that tearing away and that blissful agony of knowing came the very first steps to freedom.

Yet even then, they resisted. Even then they clung to the last vestiges of their delusion. Far from embracing those scattered scions of truth that still held fast up in the shadowlands, they sought to destroy them. To break them.

They hunted them.

So the Hunt contained no justice. The Hunt was shame in its most brutally effective form. And the kill, it was a purging, a deep catharsis, that withered with the dawn. Hunters found no peace, they gained no satisfaction. They lived outside of the world not because they knew of the dark that resided beyond the doorstep, but because they saw it was a mere shadow of the darkness that rested under warm sheets and sewed up its depravity in wedding dresses and clip-on ties. They saw it inside every frightened face, every seeming innocent they looked upon and no number of hunts, no swathe of kills would ever truly render them clean of it. A futile crusade that they took onto themselves while humanity stayed safe in their denial. That life was pure, and it was good. And separate. And special.

To a Hunter every kill, every fight, every loss to the cause was just a scream from the soul that this burden, this terrible humanity was simply too much. Hunters dwelled in the twilight, halfway to the light, knowing too much and too much of themselves, yet shielding their eyes from the gospel this knowledge revealed.

Hunters held themselves as the protectors of humanity, but it was their very humanity they sought to escape. This was their true hunt, for a prey they could never catch. For a terror they would never kill.

This was Lucifer's first lesson to Sam.


End file.
